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Friday, September 23, 2011

Millennial Extremes 6: Breaking the Light Barrier

Image Source: I09.

It looks like one of the great barriers, the fastest speed possible, has been broken. I09 is reporting: "Looks like Einstein may have been wrong — An international team of scientists at CERN has recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light."
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4 comments:

  1. Thomas Haller BuchananSeptember 23, 2011 at 10:22 PM

    My knowledge on this subject is very limited, even though I have read much on the subject—it's just so intimidating to the layman.

    But I do recall reading several years ago of the theoretical possibility of particles that travel faster than the speed of light, but could not go SLOWER than the speed of light, thus preserving the barrier concept. I have not heard yet how this latest report relates to that notion.

    So far, this experiment sounds like a parlor trick until it can be repeated independently.

    Science is wonderful, but I've always felt that our civilization is far too young to be making absolute claims about the nature of the universe or the mind of God.

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  2. LC DouglassSeptember 24, 2011 at 1:00 AM

    Thanks very much for a poignant comment Thomas, yes I agree! I mentioned this to someone today, who said 'They *think* they have observed something faster than the speed of light, which is not necessarily the same thing as actually observing something faster than the speed of light.' If that's the case, this is more an expression of wish fulfillment and all the more telling - why do we want to find something in this world that breaks perhaps the most important rule of all?

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  3. Infidel753September 25, 2011 at 11:47 AM

    It's going to take time before we know what this means, if anything. The CERN scientists observed something that seemed incredible, and they've done the appropriate thing in such a case -- they've published the details so that others can replicate the experiment and see if they get the same result. They're being properly cautious, even if the media are going off the deep end as they typically do with science stories.

    My guess is it will turn out to be a measurement error.

    Those hypothetical particles that can only travel faster than light are called "tachyons". The particles in the CERN experiment were neutrinos, which definitely exist but have never previously been observed appearing to exceed the speed of light.

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  4. LC DouglassSeptember 29, 2011 at 9:39 PM

    Thanks for your comment, Infidel, let's see if they can reproduce the experiment elsewhere, or even at CERN itself.

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